University life offers many opportunities to nourish ambitions in the real world. You can edit the student newspaper, rise through a political party or run a college bar.

But now American students have another option: to become a sex columnist. It is not so much Sex and the City as Sex and the Campus. Across America, student sex columnists have become all the rage, aping the fictional style of Carrie Bradshaw with tell-all confessionals about their sex lives and the intricacies of dating the opposite (or same) sex.

There is little room for modesty in the columns, which are frank descriptions of college bedroom antics. Sari Eitches spent a year writing 'Sex on Tuesday', the sex column in the University of California, Berkeley's student newspaper, The Daily Californian. Her articles often left little to the imagination, with titles such as 'Be a better bedder' and one on masturbation called 'In your own hands'. She even addressed the issue of sadomasochism in a piece headlined 'Some like it rough'.

'I never set out to shock anyone just for the sake of it. I go to an extremely liberal university and it would be hard to shock anyone. But, I also liked to push things and to see how far I could go,' Eitches said.

She is one of a growing breed of writers exposing the sex lives of America's students. The University of California has a column called the 'Wednesday Hump', Cornell has one called 'Cornellingus' and the distinguished Emory University in Atlanta has 'Mouth to Mouth'. There are many others.

Not even the Ivy League colleges are immune to the phenomenon. Newspapers at both Harvard and Yale have sex columnists. Indeed, the position has become a potential springboard to a real career in publishing. Natalie Krinsky wrote a sex column at Yale called, 'Sex and the Elm City', that has now turned into a bestselling book called Chloe Does Yale. The book, published in the US by Hyperion, chronicles the sex adventures of a fictional Yale student named Chloe, who bears a suspicious resemblance to Krinsky, and is interspersed with Krinsky's real life columns.

Krinsky said there was no dilemma in writing about student sex from such prestigious institutions as America's top colleges. 'Yale and Harvard and Princeton are very much revered as serious centres of academia, but there's also the other side and it's exciting and fun to see that,' she said.

Indeed, student sex has become a mainstay of American literature. Tom Wolfe devoted his most recent book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, to the subject, chronicling in exhaustive detail the debauchery of campus life. It has also become a subject of fascination outside the campuses. Rumours that Barbara Bush, daughter of President George W Bush, once attended a 'naked party' at Yale sparked a media frenzy and a $1 million reward for evidence from pornographer Larry Flynt.

Unlike other prestigious university positions, the title of student sex columnist has its drawbacks. Writers have to get used to notoriety and can afford no qualms about putting their private lives on display. There is also the danger that their parents might read their colourful piece on oral sex, or - as in Eitches case - a piece extolling the virtues of anal sex. 'My parents have been supportive. They don't take it too seriously,' she said.

Unlike Krinsky, Eitches has no plans to use her experience as a sex columnist to launch a media career. She is studying medicine and aims to become a doctor, albeit specialising in gynaecology. 'I am on the route to being a doctor. I had a great time as a sex columnist, but I got a little tired of putting myself out there in that way all the time,' she said.

But there is a serious sex educational element behind the raunchy literature. Many students coping with raging hormones and their first exposure to large amounts of alcohol probably ignore official health advice on unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. A jaunty sex columnist who is also a fellow student could fill that gap.

Last weekend, the company that makes Trojan condoms hosted a discussion in New York between 12 student sex editors and sex experts such as Dr Drew Pinsky. The meeting is now to become an annual event.